CoffeeOne wrote on 2023-09-20, 15:42:

512MB RAM is very little for Windows 7. So I would not try below 1GB, so the socket 7 platform is out. But I understand you are […]
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UselessSoftware wrote on 2023-09-18, 23:32:

.....

It's not a RAM issue, I have 512 MB on it.

512MB RAM is very little for Windows 7.
So I would not try below 1GB, so the socket 7 platform is out.
But I understand you are just checking if it is possible.
Like Windows XP on a 486-Pentium Overdrive. That "runs", too.

There are socket 7 motherboards that can use more than 512mb

They aren’t the best boards in other ways but they would work.

Tempts me to try scrounging together a Socket 7 with max memory, sadly I think I got rid of all the 512mb and 1gb sdram modules I had to test

CoffeeOne wrote on 2023-09-20, 15:42:

512MB RAM is very little for Windows 7. So I would not try below 1GB, so the socket 7 platform is out. But I understand you are […]
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UselessSoftware wrote on 2023-09-18, 23:32:

.....

It's not a RAM issue, I have 512 MB on it.

512MB RAM is very little for Windows 7.
So I would not try below 1GB, so the socket 7 platform is out.
But I understand you are just checking if it is possible.
Like Windows XP on a 486-Pentium Overdrive. That "runs", too.

I meant in the sense that 512 MB is plenty for Windows 7 boot up and function. It wouldn't have been the cause of the hangs.

As far as it being not enough to be usable, it totally depends on what you're doing.

Running some old late 90's games? Or writing some docs in Office 2007? Checking your email? It's plenty.

Browsing the modern web or running a bunch of programs at once? Nope, you're gonna have a bad time with that. I wouldn't be building a socket 7 system for web browsing anyway. 😀

PcBytes wrote on 2023-09-20, 16:58:

I still fail to see how people come up with these numbers. I've ran XP SP2 and SP3 on as old as Deschutes 350MHz and 256MB of RA […]
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I still fail to see how people come up with these numbers.
I've ran XP SP2 and SP3 on as old as Deschutes 350MHz and 256MB of RAM with no issues.

The key here is how speedy your hard drive is. Trust me, it sounds weird, but it plays an important role.

For example - same machine (Luckystar 6BX2, P2 350, 256MB SDRAM) struggled with a 1.6GB WD Caviar 21600. Not just XP - any OS ran dog slow.
The exact same machine flied once I installed a bigger and newer Maxtor 6E040L0 and a BIOS patch.
Of course, this was before the internet updated so much that it made browsing on XP unusable due to TLS issues.

Disk speed is so important. I use solid state whenever possible, even on old machines. Barring that, I use a "modern" 7200 RPM IDE drive. Minimal access latency is a major determining factor in responsiveness of the machine.

Even on an old 8088, using a CF card instead of an MFM drive will let you load your programs considerably faster.

PcBytes wrote on 2023-09-20, 16:58:

I still fail to see how people come up with these numbers.
I've ran XP SP2 and SP3 on as old as Deschutes 350MHz and 256MB of RAM with no issues.

In my case it was simple. Our family PC was a Pentium III 733 Mhz with 128 or 256 MB RAM.
It shipped with Windows 98SE.
When we got XP, it was dog slow.

So we installed some more RAM by installing RAM in all the SDRAM (?) slots.
And since capacity at the time was rather limited per module, we naturally ended up with 768MB.

The configuration was something like 128+128+256+256, so dual channel was working, I suppose.
Anyway, this was about 20 years ago. I don't exactly remember things anymore. 🤷‍♂️

PcBytes wrote on 2023-09-20, 16:58:

The key here is how speedy your hard drive is. Trust me, it sounds weird, but it plays an important role.

Yes, but that improves performance of the swap file/virtual memory, as well.
Under certain circumstances, application code can be directly executed from VCache.
That feature was introduced in ca. Windows 98SE, I believe.

When we had installed 2GB in an Athlon 64 X2 PC, we noticed another performance boost (XP SP2).

When Windows 7 came out, we had something like 8 or 12 GB in that same PC.
XP was still installed on another partition. It was blazingly fast and could see a bit over 3GB.

An SSD was later installed, as well, on which both Windows XP/7 were installed (with alignment corrected for XP partition).
The dual-boot was handy to boot into XP and run Acronis True Image 9, for example .

UselessSoftware wrote on 2023-09-20, 20:44:

Even on an old 8088, using a CF card instead of an MFM drive will let you load your programs considerably faster.

On an AT with a CF card adapter, yes, I agree.

On an XT, not so much. My experience was the opposite.
The old MFM drive with its controller card was quicker than XT IDE CF Lite.

Probably because of XTIDE Universal BIOS being written in C/C++ vs the old controller BIOS written in assembler.

On an XT with an 8-Bit processor, there's only so much that can be done, I'm afraid. 😔

UselessSoftware wrote on 2023-09-20, 03:25:

ACPI […]
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Sphere478 wrote on 2023-09-20, 03:23:

I’m really bummed that we will never see windows 7 on a dual 233mmx as I don’t believe any board supporting dual pentium 1 ever had (I forget what it’s called, some sort of thing they introduced on the 430tx south bridge that I think was for power management?) trying to remember.

ACPI

Yeah that's a shame, I'd love to see that.

I wonder if removing the requirement from 7 is is something that some highly dedicated retronaut would be willing to look into.

Server 2003 is supposed to be able to work on pentium up to osr2? I’m trying to remember all this, may be getting something wrong.

Anyway, even setting it to mps in setup I could never get it to work. Even though it is based on xp it is probably the closest you can get to a modern OS on dual pentium 1

Modding for acpi would be awesome.

Many of those dual pentium boards supported up to 512mb of ram and a radeon 9250 and with two processors, it may actually run half way decent. But I doubt as well as 9x/ME on a k6-3+ on the same mobo.

UselessSoftware wrote on 2023-09-20, 04:22:

Chugging along happily and stable! :D […]
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Chugging along happily and stable! 😁

Usable if you're on benzos.

Holy crap, you got the internet working on a k6? How well does it work?

At the comments about ram, 768 or 512mb on socket 7 doing a windows 7 attempt is about as good as you will get.

Some socket 7 systems can do 1.5gb 768 and 1.5gb is often slower or less stable on these systems btw, but you probably won’t be able to run programs very well that would use 1.5gb anyway. I did my windows 7 experiments on a k6-3+ 450 and 256mb of ram. It may have been faster with more ram to decompress into but it did run and did have free ram.

Sphere478 wrote on 2023-09-21, 00:51:

Server 2003 is supposed to be able to work on pentium up to osr2? I’m trying to remember all this, may be getting something wron […]
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UselessSoftware wrote on 2023-09-20, 03:25:

ACPI […]
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Sphere478 wrote on 2023-09-20, 03:23:

I’m really bummed that we will never see windows 7 on a dual 233mmx as I don’t believe any board supporting dual pentium 1 ever had (I forget what it’s called, some sort of thing they introduced on the 430tx south bridge that I think was for power management?) trying to remember.

ACPI

Yeah that's a shame, I'd love to see that.

I wonder if removing the requirement from 7 is is something that some highly dedicated retronaut would be willing to look into.

Server 2003 is supposed to be able to work on pentium up to osr2? I’m trying to remember all this, may be getting something wrong.

Anyway, even setting it to mps in setup I could never get it to work. Even though it is based on xp it is probably the closest you can get to a modern OS on dual pentium 1

Modding for acpi would be awesome.

Many of those dual pentium boards supported up to 512mb of ram and a radeon 9250 and with two processors, it may actually run half way decent. But I doubt as well as 9x/ME on a k6-3+ on the same mobo.

UselessSoftware wrote on 2023-09-20, 04:22:

Chugging along happily and stable! :D […]
Show full quote

Chugging along happily and stable! 😁

Usable if you're on benzos.

Holy crap, you got the internet working on a k6? How well does it work?

At the comments about ram, 768 or 512mb on socket 7 doing a windows 7 attempt is about as good as you will get.

Some socket 7 systems can do 1.5gb 768 and 1.5gb is often slower or less stable on these systems btw, but you probably won’t be able to run programs very well that would use 1.5gb anyway. I did my windows 7 experiments on a k6-3+ 450 and 256mb of ram. It may have been faster with more ram to decompress into but it did run and did have free ram.

I ran Server 2003 R2 on a Cyrix MII, no problems except for being horribly slow 🤣

It would be fun to try dual Pentium benchmarks in games with a decent GPU, see how much the CPU power is bottlenecking things.

The internet on a K6.... yeah it's not good! 😀

Sites like Vogons or old.reddit.com work well enough, but anything heavier than that is not something you even want to bother with!

Sphere478 wrote on 2023-09-19, 00:19:

It’s worthlessly slow. Not really worth it other than to say you did.

Which would be more than enough reason to go through with the project? 🤣

H3nrik V! wrote on 2023-09-23, 21:15:

Sphere478 wrote on 2023-09-19, 00:19:

It’s worthlessly slow. Not really worth it other than to say you did.

Which would be more than enough reason to go through with the project? 🤣

Touché